Nationalism has traditionally been a powerful force in domestic politics and international relations. In its most extreme (and destructive) form, nationalism is known as jingoism (long live the Holy Fatherland!).

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The nature of nationalism depends on the context. One type of nationalism is that of an ethnic group or region, who are not recognised as a free nation, asserting their right to nationhood and demanding sovereignty. Contemporary examples of this include Irish nationalism (in Northern Ireland), Basque nationalism, Kurdish nationalism and Tibetan nationalism. Some of the current states of the world, including Australia, India and the USA, owe their existence to the struggles of nationalists during colonial history, while others, such as Germany and Italy, were formed by nationalist unifications of smaller existing states.

Since the concept of nation is so fluid, nationalist groups can flow and transform from one to another. For example, when Yugoslavia collapsed, and split along ethnic lines, it was possible (and indeed, inevitable) for a former Yugoslav nationalist to transfer that feeling to his smaller ethnic group. Gamal Nasser of Egypt was important in a movement that worked to create a pan-Arab nationalism.

Other types of nationalism involve promoting the idea that one's own nation is inherently superior to other nations in its values, culture and other attributes. In modern times, this form of nationalism is most associated with fascism and Nazism, and played an important part in Italian, German and Japanese aggression before and during World War II. It is also strongly associated with racism, and the word "nationalist" continues to carry these connotations. In the English-speaking world, few people would describe themselves as a nationalist, and those few are usually also associated with racialism, whereas the word "patriot" or "patriotism" are more readily used in terms of positive sentiments about one's country.

Today, the phrase 'nationalism card' is sometimes used by the media to describe tactics used by some governments to maintain legitimacy (China shall not be mentioned to avoid putting it in bad light...), and they are not sensationally wrong. Examples include the use of national holidays, especially independence days with military parades (read show-offs), to divert public attention from the corruption and incompetence of the current government, and the act of raising tension with another country or territory (we gotta beat these barbarians, folks!). In general, expect a blatant amount of appeal to emotions and ego and perhaps even war (remember Falklands?). Because it makes the public more vulnerable to delusions of grandeur (we are proud to be your irony ruler(s)!), 'nationalism card' can be considered a form of propaganda.

Nationalism has paradoxically been seen as both universal and particular.[2] Amid constant debates, schools of thought have emerged that try to explain it. The following are some of the major ones.

Primordialism: An early strain of nationalism as a coherent academic thought, its followers argued that nations are timeless, biological phenomena. Though the school has it origins in Romanticism, it has since become discredited by most scholars especially after the Second World War.[3]

Perrenialism: A response to (and an off-shoot of) Primordialism, it instead posits that nations are not found in nature, but have changed in shape and kind over time. Similarly to the Primordialists however, it argues that countries have been around for a long time.[4]

Modernism: Coming into prominence in part as a rebuttal to Primordialism, Modernist scholars argue that nationalism is an entirely modern construct of relatively recent vintage, a product of modernity itself. Marxist critiques of nationalism tend to either fall here or in postmodern off-shoots. Benedict Anderson's idea of nations as "imagined communities" also largely stems from this tradition.[5]

Ethnosymbolism: A response to both Modernists and Perrenialists, Ethno-symbolists and similar offshoots seek to reconcile the two sides, stressing the importance of symbols, myths, values and traditions.[6] In this view, nations are both ancient and modern, invented even as they're rooted in history. The school in its current form was pioneered by scholars such as Anthony D. Smith.

Politically, nationalists tend to be rather conservative, as they seek to reconnect with the "old ways" of their people. However, there have been many liberal nationalists, who felt that their nation could only survive by making drastic changes in the social and political systems. Some, such as Mohammad Mossadegh, were part of the anti-colonial movement.

Today, there is a concentration of such nationalists in East Asia.[8] In the past, German nationalism was also a liberal idea, attempting to unite a Germany fractured into a slew of tiny states after the Napoleonic Wars; the Deutschlandlied, much later to become a favorite song of Nazis,[9] was initially written as a drinking song by a liberal professor who was rewarded for his pains by being fired from his job and hounded by the police. After Otto von Bismarck succeeded in uniting most of the German-speaking areas, and German Austria became independent of the non-German parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the idea became a feature of the extreme right.

That said, due to the at times confusing dynamics between nationalism and patriotism, like populism it's hard to really pin down where it fits in the political spectrum when the term itself can have various (charged) meanings in different countries and covers various right-wing and left-wing strains.

During the Second World War, various propaganda films were created by the US and UK governments, which portrayed nationalism alongside left-wing ideas, in contrast to Nazism:

“”For this is Britain, where we believe in freedom. We also believe in peace. Peace to develop our inheritance. This was the Britain we inherited from the industrial revolution, and this is the sort of Britain we have been trying to build during the times of peace. ... A gigantic task we undertook to re-house the urban population into well-built, well-lighted, well-ventilated flats to replace the tumbled-down slums of the past. ... We had no use for war, we had no designs on others. Our only enemies were the common enemies of mankind: poverty, bad conditions, the rigours of the northern climate, disease. And we had them on the run. It seemed to be the beginning of a new age, and is it to stop because one man chooses to force his outworn ideas on Europe?

—The Lion Has Wings, British documentary-style propaganda piece from 1940.[10]

↑ One current example of this could be Guo Quan, who is an extreme Chinese nationalist, but also a leading democracy advocate.

↑ That is, once they had eliminated the third verse, which contained too many references to freedom and justice for their liking, and the second verse, which contained too many references to distractions like wine, women, and song.